Maybe I'm missing something here, but it seems to me that these problems are due to the cache putting pressure on VM, so process pages get swapped out. The obvious solution to this is to limit the size of the cache, or implement some sort of algorithm to slow its growth and reduce the pressure on VM. It also seems that one of the causes for the cache expanding is large bulk file copies, or reads for say, mp3 playing. Wasn't there a flag to disable caching on file IO that these programs could use, to keep from polluting the cache?